Saturday 14 July 2012 19.04 EDT
First published on Saturday 14 July 2012 19.04 EDT

When American dailies sweat over losses, they ditch the daily bit. Thus, from Detroit to New Orleans, some days of publication get dropped. Last week, one of my favourite small papers, the Anniston Star of Alabama, stopped coming out on Mondays because that was its feeblest-selling day of the week. And now you can play exactly that game in Britain as our ABC circulation-crunching researchers provide average indices for national paper sales. So: no Daily Record, Mail or Indy on Monday? No Express, Telegraph, FT, Guardian or Times on Tuesday? No Star or Mirror on Wednesday? No Sun on Friday?

Happily, this catalogue of the weakest days more or less guarantees that it won't happen here. The Mirror won't give the Sun a free ride on Wednesdays, or get one in return on Fridays. Competition means constant appearance until last breaths are drawn. Less happily, that day may not be far away when you examine the rest of June's full statistical bundle.

National daily circulation is down 7.79% in a year. That's more than 700,000 copies gone. Within this, there are jolts to register. One is the slight rise for the Times and Telegraph, against falls for the Guardian and Indy. How much of that is due to success on Saturday sales, where both the losers are down 2.9% whilst the Times (oh Jubilee-ation), registers a 6,000-copy increase?

But if Mr Murdoch can be cheerier about the Times, he can also see the Sun edging perilously closer to 2.5m on weekdays, a year-on-year drop of 7.95% (with a walloping price rise just announced). The Sunday Bun is also sliding now, down from 3.21m at birth in February to 2.18m in June. And perhaps the most open question of all hovers pinkly over Southwark Bridge.

The FT sold 356,000 copies a day in June 2011; this June – 16.56% gone – 297,225, the first home-and-away dip below 300,000. Print copy sales in England and Wales are down by some 15,000. Sales overseas have slumped 43,000 in 12 months. Good news, bad news? It depends how you blend paper and online subscription readership. Do that, and pink spin doctors talk about record growth. Next stop: no print FT at all, and thus no need to worry about weakest days?

Past its read-by date

Ethical migraine time: U-T San Diego (the old Union-Tribune daily) adopts a digital first strategy, which means that news online gets printed pronto and print trundles on behind. Then it publishes a news feature piece on its front page that (a reader complains) was put on the website a fortnight earlier. How first is first? Do we need read-by as well as sell-by dates? When does an "anyway feature" become just another old pile of cold potatoes?